Saturday, February 23, 2008

STUG now has its official and nice looking URL. The address is http://speedstug.com/ I'm very excited that everything has been migrated. The old URL is currently set to redirect and the site can still be reached by old addresses. However, this URL is much easier to remember and is actually relevant, no more of that e-expo stuff.

It was a little bit of a rocky start. Travis purchased it and set it up in no time flat, however images, CSS, and javascript wasn't loading. I eventually tracked the problem down to the .htaccess file and now things are up and running.

I'm very, very excited about this and currently am working on plastering the URL all over the internet to get some visibility.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

When I get a new profile picture it takes a while for me to update everything. Even before that, Cassie has to draw my profile picture. My habit for my last five profile pictures is to have them custom drawn by Cassie. She really does a great job and tends to use different art styles each time so they all look really different.

However, just getting my profile pictures is the first step. She doesn't tend to draw them in perfect squares, so my first step is to crop it to a square. While I'm at it, I edit the picture down to a smaller resolution for those services that don't support the higher resolution images.

Once I get finished making all of the technical preparations I then start uploading the picture to everywhere on the internet that I have a profile picture. This is actually a rather lengthy list. I keep a folder on my computer where I sort my old profile pictures. In addition to the pictures, I keep a Word document containing the locations that I use a profile pictures. This gives me a quick checklist when I get a new pictures so I know I've uploaded it to everywhere.

I don't really use everyone of the above services regularly, but my profile picture exists at each location so I keep it up to date. I really do see a need for standardization with regard to updating information across multiple services. It is nice that some places, such as Gmail, update across multiple applications now, but it still does take a decent amount of time to update all of the different locations.

Actually updating the pictures doesn't really bother me that much. It is an event for me. It is even fun to a certain extent. However, there is a little headache that goes with the process. Mainly compatibility. The problem is different services don't like taking the new pictures. The two that really give me a hard time have been Pownce and Gmail. It normally takes more than one try to get the new profile picture to stick.

I can see how a service that would help standardize this process would definitely be useful. For the time being, I will continue to go site to site updating my picture. The main thing I need to remember is when I register for a new service, I need to add it to my list of places to update.

So I thought I'd give Twitter a chance. I'm giving it a chance but I don't know how much use I will actually get out of the service. I already linked Twitter to my Facebook status message and even added the RSS feed to appear right at the top of my Blog.

Twitter works best when all of your friends use it. In my case, almost none of my friends use it. I don't think that will really be a influence for me to stop using the service, since I can easily tie it into my other web applications that I use. I really like having things networked together. When I Digg something, it appears on my Facebook profile and on my Blog. I really like having my actions propagate across multiple locations very quickly.

I haven't activate the phone part of the service yet. I could since I have plenty of text messages to spare each month, but I don't know if I would find it useful yet. I did activate the IM part of the service. I only wish it supported more platforms for messaging.

I will probably give an update eventually on what I think about Twitter. It is a quick way to share things, and I may find it more useful that writing entire blog entries if I want to share a quick thought.